


20th Century Boy

by CinnaAtHeart



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, And angst, DLSS2016, F/M, Gift Fic, Science Nerd Bucky Barnes, Time Travel, hahaha can't escape that angst, non-specific wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey nonsense, reverse time-travel trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 22:54:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8686531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CinnaAtHeart/pseuds/CinnaAtHeart
Summary: Bucky Barnes falls through more than just the Swiss Alps.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akabit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akabit/gifts).



> Gifted to Akabit for the Darcy Lewis Secret Santa 2016 exchange! I'm afraid this one got away from me; I'd already written a time-travel fic before, so I thought; hey, why not reverse the trope? So I did ^.^
> 
> (Title taken from the Placebo song of the same name) 
> 
> Happy Holidays and enjoy! <3 <3

“Bucky!” Steve shouts, his words barely legible over Bucky’s terrified gasps and the merciless wind. “Hang on!”

Easier said than done. He tries to swing himself over to Steve, but the angle is all wrong and Steve is too far-  _too far._ The frozen wind burns his skin, the snow like needles that burrow beneath his flesh. “Grab my hand!” Steve cries, but all Bucky can hear is the screech of metal, the bolts of the railing tearing free.

For the briefest of moments, he is weightless.

And then he is falling down down  _down,_ and all he can hear are his screams and the wind, screaming back. He tumbles through the air, images bleeding into a stream of white and black and time seems to stretch, caught in a single, blurred moment. His vision blackens, and he wonders how things could get any worse than this-

And then things get much,  _much_ worse.

The searing numbness of the icy wind transforms from one fleeting moment to the next into a burning agony, his body consumed by it, as though being turned inside out. Bucky tries to cry out, certain he’s falling straight into hell itself- just like Father Lawrence always warned him- but there’s no air in his lungs. He falls and falls and  _falls,_ and the  _pain._ His entire being concentrates into a single, burning crescendo of torment. Die,  _die he just wants to die_ \- anything but this never-ending agony, as though his soul is being torn to pieces.

And then as suddenly as it began, the burning stops, and Bucky is flung onto the hard ground like a forgotten toy. He tumbles and rolls, skin burning and tearing, but the pain barely registers. When finally his body stops rolling and he lies still, face pressed to the ground, he’s overcome with hysterical relief.

 _It’s over,_ he thinks. 

 _Thank God,_ he thinks. 

 _I_ _’m going to be sick,_ he thinks, and he is, leaning up on one braced elbow to vomit his rations on the dry ground. The smell makes him retch again, even when there’s nothing left in his stomach, and Bucky rolls over onto his back away from it, squinting up at the sky- an endless, eternal blue so clear and bright it brings tears to his eyes. He groans again, and blacks it out with an arm draped over his face.

He doesn’t know how much time passes as he lies there, drifting in and out of consciousness, stuck in a warm and quiet fog. He’s unable to do anything when he hears a strange-sounding truck pull up and its doors open and close. He lies there paralysed by fatigue as voices start talking above him; their words are garbled, as though hearing them through a wall.

“… Can’t just leave….”

“… Can and will… ambulance… hospital can take care…”

“… closest hospital not for… just throw him in the…”

“With the… what if he’s…”

Bucky tries to listen to the agitated voices but he’s already fading away again, falling back to that warm and quiet place where nothing can hurt him.

By the time the voices finally stop, Bucky is long gone.

 

* * *

  

Bucky wakes violently, limbs flailing, heart in his throat. It takes longer than it should to realise he’s no longer falling and he breathes in desperately, panting as though he’s just run a mile.

For a moment, he wonders if the train and the falling and the After had all be just some terrible dream, but it had felt too acutely real, and when he looks at his hands, his knuckles are scabbed over, half-healed already, the skin cleaned and the worst of his cuts bandaged. He must have been out for a good few hours, he thinks, and he lies almost fully clothed- though his thick woollen jacked it gone- on a bed too plush and clean to have any place in Europe.

Ill-at-ease, Bucky rolls off the bed, landing on his heels. He’s relieved to discover that the knife tucked into his boot is still there, and it’s a familiar and comforting weight in his hand as he looks around the room wildly.

He’s in some kind of ritzy cell, made up to look like a bedroom, but whoever set it up much be an idiot because everything is  _wrong._ The light fittings are strange- too sleek, the coverings flush with the ceiling in a way that is utterly alien to him- and the furniture is oddly plasticky, with too much polished metal to be considered fashionable. There’s some kind of clock beside the bed, short and squat in black plastic, but the numbers are made of red light, the bulbs too small for him to see. His jacket lies draped over a plastic rolling chair (so much plastic!) and Bucky puts it back on gratefully, despite the warmth.

“Where the fuck am I?” he breathes. Even the air is wrong- perfumed by some strange, artificial lavender scent, and the wrongness of it all sets his teeth on edge.

Bucky hears the sound of heels on tiles and he straightens. The footsteps grow louder and closer, and on silent feet he creeps over to the door- when it opens (unlocked, he’s surprised to learn) - he’s hidden by it, and a woman walks inside, making a soft sound of surprise when she finds the room empty.

“What the-” she murmurs, and Bucky bursts into action, rushing forward and pinning her against the wall. The tip of his combat knife presses up against her ribs whilst his other arm holds her hands against the wall.

“Hey,” she cries out, struggling against his grip, but she’s thin, and there’s only one person Bucky knows of that can overpower him.

“I’d stay still if I were you sweetheart,” he says lowly, and pokes the knife a little harder against her skin for emphasis. The woman stills, her breath turning high and sharp with fear. “All I gotta do is slide this between your ribs and you’re as good as dead.”

“What do you want?” she hisses, and Bucky would be surprised by the steel in her voice if he hadn’t worked with Carter for so long

“Where am I?” he says. The woman makes an insulted sound.

“Where do you  _think_  you are?” she snaps, and Bucky has to bite back his amusement; she’s far too much like Peggy for him to be anything less, but he sticks to his guns and repeats himself. The woman growls in frustration. “You’re in Puente Antiguo, dumbass. Where else do you think you’d be?”

Puente Antiguo. Bucky has no idea where that’s meant to be, but judging from the woman’s accent, he’s possibly back in the US, though the  _how_ of that is anyone’s guess. “What do you want with me?” he growls, and the woman twitches beneath his grip, twisting to look at him incredulously.

“Nothing,” she says, and Bucky’s watches as her gaze slips past him, expression on her face morphing into something close to relief. He stiffens, turning around but it’s too late- he hears a loud  _crack,_ and this his body seizes, pain lancing up and down his limbs. The woman scrambles away and Bucky, unable to control himself, falls down. His head hits the side of the desk with a fleshy  _thud_ as he topples, and the force of it rattles through his jaw.

He’s out before he even hits the floor.

 

* * *

 

 Bucky wakes slowly this time, his head viciously throbbing in time with his slow and steady pulse.

Mind muddy and feeling distinctly nauseous, he feigns sleep as he takes stock. He’s tied to a chair this time, and the unforgiving tightness around his chest and arms brings back unpleasant memories of Azzano and Zola. His boots and coat are gone- Bucky’s sure he’s been thoroughly checked for weapons this time around.  _Damn._ He can’t believe he let someone get the drop on him.

“I know you’re awake.”

Bucky very nearly jumps.  _Again, dammit._ He’s slacking off and it’s fucking unacceptable. He opens his eyes, but the bright light streaming into the room feel like bolts of agony aimed straight for his brain and he squeezes them shut, groaning despite his better judgement. Someone sighs heavily and Bucky hears the clicking grate of curtains drawing shut. He ventures another attempt, and though the pain is still there, it’s mercifully nothing like it had previously been.

“Better?” the new voice asks, and Bucky searches for her blearily, blinking to try and dispel the grittiness beneath his eyelids.

The woman stands a little to the left of him, some kind of strange gun aimed at him; her hands don’t waver, and when Bucky studies her (dark hair, lips the colour of dried blood and icy blue eyes, like Steve’s when he gets mad) he sees clear as day the determination in her gaze. The tight, downwards curl of her lips remind him of Carter when she’s about to kick their collective asses.

“What do you want?” he rasps, and glares at her unsteadily. “Why am I here?”

She raises a meticulously arched brow, unimpressed. The other woman- the one he’d threatened- is here too. She hovers anxiously by the windows, but glares at him when she realises he’s looking at her.

“Well, I was kind of hoping you’d tell us,” the other woman says, commanding his attention again. Bucky shifts in his seat and her eyes flash dangerously. “Don’t even think about it,” she growls. “I’ve checked you for more weapons. Attacking her?” she nods over at her friend pointedly. “Bad idea. Her maybe-boyfriend will fuck you up.”

Bucky’s brows rise in surprise at the casually spoken expletive, and the other woman makes an indignant sound. “He’s  _not_ my boyfriend, Darcy!” she says, a little too shrill or Bucky’s headache to appreciate. Darcy grimaces, but her sharp gaze doesn’t stray from Bucky. Smart girl.

“He may as well be- though it’d be nice if he could maybe turn up once in a while!” towards the end of her speech, her voice turns oddly loud and she glares up at the ceiling. Bucky stares at her in confusion.

“What do you want with me?” Bucky asks again. The words seem to take more effort than they’re worth.

“ _Want with you?”_ Darcy asks derisively. “We don’t want  _anything_ from you- unless you’ve got connections to an Ivy League.”

“Then why am I being tied up?”

“Uh- maybe because you  _tried to kill Jane?”_

“Threatened,” Jane corrects her.

“He held a knife to you, Jane! Call me a nit-picky, but I think that’s a little extreme of a reaction, don’t you think?”

Jane stays silent and Darcy turns her attention back to him. “We found you passed out in the middle of the road. Thought you were just some drunk cosplaying dumbass.” Bucky’s eyes narrow at the insult but Darcy ignores him. “Of course, then you go and pull a Jason Bourne and scare the shit out of Jane and I. So what’s the deal? Are you with Shield?”

“Who?”

The women share a weighted glance. Darcy’s grip on her strange plastic gun tightens. “Who are you?”

Bucky sets his jaw, memories of a metal table and thick, circular glasses springing to his mind unbidden. “James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant. Three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight.”

Darcy suddenly grows still, gaze so sharp Bucky is half certain she’s staring straight into his soul.

“I don’t know what kind of joke you’re playing,” she says slowly, and he’s only half certain he catches the layer of venom in her words, “but it’s in  _very_ poor taste.”

He swallows. His mouth tastes like fucking sand and blood. “Where am I?” he asks again.

“Puente Antiguo.”

“Where’s that?”

She raises a brow. “New Mexico?”

“ _New Mexico?”_ he hisses in outrage. “Do you seriously expect me to believe that?”

“Jesus buddy, how much did you  _drink_ last night?”

His eyes narrow. “If you expect me to believe I somehow got from-” he breaks off, biting at the inside of his cheek to stop himself from talking. The last thing he remembers is falling, that goddamn train and  _Steve_ speeding away in the frozen winds of the Alps. He will  _not_ go spouting classified information out to these women. He’s survived multiple interrogations from  _Hydra._ Bucky Barnes will  _not_ allow himself to be tricked into revealing critical information.

Behind Darcy. Jane makes a soft, surprised sound. She’s looking at something in her hand. “Darce- you should look at this,” she says lowly, and thrusts something small and rectangular into her face. A look of irritation flickers across her face before shifting to shock. She glances back at him, the down at the rectangle thing, then back at him.

“Jesus,” she breathes, disbelief warring with suspicion on her face. She takes the thing off Jane and Bucky wonders what it is on there that captivates her attention so. “I thought there was a resemblance, but this is just uncanny.”

Darcy steps towards him and turns the rectangle thing around. His eyes widen in surprise and he sucks in a sharp breath. “What the hell is that?” he asks, stunned.  _His face_ \- the rectangle thing has got  _his face_ on it… but it’s wrong- like everything else. No photograph he’s ever seen as looked like that before, and even if they did, he doesn’t know why these women would find a picture of him just lying around. “I don’t understand- what the  _hell is that?”_

“It’s you,” she says. “Or your doppelgänger.” Darcy stares at him curiously. “So fanboy, how’d you do it? Plastic surgery?”

He stares at her blankly. “Do  _what?”_

She rolls her eyes. “Oh  _come on;_ everyone and their aunt’s know Bucky Barnes died in World War Two. Ain’t no way you could look like him without having to go under the knife?”

He stares at her helplessly. He honestly doesn’t know what to say; everything about this entire encounter has taken a turn for the fucking weird, because he is  _very obviously_ not dead, and the way she’s talking about the war would imply… well, he’s got a vague idea of what it implies, but the possibility is too absurd to contemplate.

Behind her, Jane watches him thoughtfully. “Darcy,” she says eventually. Darcy spares her a cursory glance of acknowledgement. “Could I talk to you outside?”

She frowns and sends the other woman a dubious look. “What- why?”

Jane just rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she growls, and snags Darcy’s arm, heading towards the door. Darcy scowls at the manhandling, and wiggles her weird gun at Bucky.

“ _Stay,_ ” she orders him, like a damn dog and Bucky bares his teeth at her as the two women walk out.

He breathes out slowly the moment the door closes behind the women and stares down at his bindings, tugging at them experimentally. They’re tight and well-secured; whoever tied him up evidently knew what they were doing. He contemplates forcing himself out of them with brute strength, but the habit of hiding his new strength from the Howlies and Steve is a hard one to break, and besides, he doesn’t want to show his hand just yet. So far, the women have been more an irritation than a threat, and inexpert interrogators  _at best._ Bucky doesn’t want to push his luck when realistically, all he needs to do is bide his time until he can get out of this whole mess. Whatever  _this_ is. He can hear the quiet hum of voices outside the room grow louder and agitated, but their conversation is too muffled for him to catch anything.

After an inordinate amount of time, the women return. He scowls at them as they walk in, but both ignore it. They stare at him with identical looks of speculation, as though seeing him for the first time, and Darcy holds her weapon down at her side, her grip on it loose but confident. In her other hand, she holds that strange rectangular thing that had his picture on it. Bucky swallows nervously; he gets the feeling that he’s not going to enjoy whatever is about to happen.

“What’s the date?” Darcy asks him. Bucky shifts uneasily in his chair.

“March third,” he says slowly. Darcy’s jaw clenches, and she glances at Jane for guidance.

“ _What year?”_ Jane repeats and the unease in his gut grows stronger.  He licks at his chapped and peeling lips nervously.

“It’s nineteen forty-five.”

A gust of air escapes Darcy and her grip on the rectangle thing tightens. She looks remarkably pale. “Fucking hell.”

“Agreed,” Jane says, staring at Bucky like he’s suddenly become the most fascinating thing in existence. He might be flattered by the attention under better circumstances, but for now he’s just pissed off. “Though let’s face it; this isn’t the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to us.”

“It’s close though.”

“Mm.”

Darcy huffs in frustration and stuffs the rectangle into the pocket of her… well, Bucky would venture and say they’re jeans- the fabric looks about right- but they’re so tight as to be obscene. The pants Jane wears are no better. “Do we call Shield?”

Jane scoffs derisively. “Hell no.”

“Then what do we do? Christ on a cracker- this is  _way_ above my pay-grade!”

“I’m not paying you.”

Darcy throws her hands up as she paces anxiously. “Exactly!”

“Could somebody  _please_ tell me  _what on Earth is going on here?”_ Bucky finally snaps, losing his patience. The women startle, as though having forgotten that he’s still there and he bites back a frustrated growl. Darcy squares her shoulders and turns back to face him. She opens her mouth to speak, but Jane beats her to it. There’s a wild, manic glint in her eyes that he’s not sure what to do with.

“Just to confirm; you think you’re James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes, right?”

He fights the urge to roll his eyes. “I  _am_ James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes.”

“Right,” Jane nods. “And you say you think it’s March three, nineteen forty-five?” Bucky’s eyes narrow as he glares. Jane pinks slightly and nods a little  _too_ emphatically. “Okay, so this is going to sound absolutely crazy, but hear us out; we’ve dealt with crazier-”

“We think you’re a time traveller!” Darcy blurts out. Jane makes an indignant sound and she covers her mouth guiltily.

“We agreed to break this to him  _slowly,_ ” she hisses. Darcy shakes her head, eyes wide and slightly panicky.

“I’m sorry!” she says from behind her hands. “I couldn’t help myself!”

Bucky stares, dumbfounded, at the women as they argue in hushed voices. “This is a delicate situation Darce! Do you want him to flip his shit again?”

“I checked him for weapons!” Darcy says defensively.

“Well call me paranoid, but Bucky Goddamn  _Barnes_ seems like  _exactly_ the kind of guy to keep more than one weapon concealed on his person!” He blinks in confusion at the use of his name. Jane speaks as though it has  _weight._

Darcy turns back to him and squares her shoulders, chin jutting out like she’s got a point to make. “We think you might be a time traveller,” she says again. “Provided you’re not playing a really  _shitty_ joke on us… buddy… it’s two thousand and ten.”

Bucky stares at her blankly, unseeing and Jane takes over, as though sensing his surprise. “What Darcy means is- if you’re really who you say you are- then somehow you’ve travelled sixty-five years into the future.”

The room falls silent as Bucky processes exactly what he’s been told. Time travel. Somehow, he’s travelled into the future- into the  _next century._ Suddenly, he grows angry. “Is this a joke?” he demands, and the venom lacing his voice has the two women jumping in surprise.

“Do we look like we’re joking?” Darcy asks him, crossing her arms as she stares down at him mulishly.

They don’t; in fact, they both look deathly serious, but that doesn’t mean Bucky is inclined to believe them for a fucking second. “A time traveller? Are you serious? What kind of next level fucked up Hydra shit are you trying to pull?” Bucky tries hard not to feel guilty for swearing in front of a dame, because  _damn_ are they both trying his patience.

Darcy’s eyes spark dangerously and she takes a step towards him angrily before Jane grabs her shoulder. “ _Hydra?_ Are you legit dude? We are  _not_ psycho Nazis, and fuck you very much for implying it!”

“Then who the hell  _are_ you people?”

“We’re scientists… or at least, I am,” Jane says, far calmer than her counterpart. Bucky rears back as though slapped. Her mouth falls open in realisation and she puts her hands up in placation. “Not  _that_ kind of scientist!” she says, but Bucky doesn’t feel much better-  _a cloying smile, the smell of disinfectant and the vicious burn of needles beneath his ski-_ “I’m an astrophysicist! I study space!”

The tightness in Bucky’s chest eases only a fraction and he breathes out slowly, surreptitiously flexing beneath his restraints. He wants to go  _home._ “What does an astrophysicist want with a guy like me?”

“Um… nothing?”

“ _Then why am I tied up?”_

“Uh- I don’t know,” Darcy drawls, voice scathing, “how about because you went batshit insane and threatened Jane with a knife? Haven’t we already covered this?”

Jane at least has the decency to look sheepish. “We- um- we didn’t know what else to do. Darcy was worried that you might threaten us again… and, well, we weren’t entirely certain you were going to be benign anyway. Things have been… kinda crazy around here lately; we thought it’d be best to take precautions. ”

Bucky can see the reasoning behind that; it’s exactly what he’d have done in their shoes. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s still the one tied up. “If I promise not to attack you, will you let me go?”

“Yes,” says Jane.

“Maybe,” says Darcy.

Jane and Bucky glare at her and Darcy throws her hands up in the air again. “What? What if he really is just some crazy guy? I still maintain we should have called the cops.”

“ _No,_ ” Jane says firmly, and Bucky closes his eyes so neither can see him rolling them with frustration. “No cops; Shield will find out, and then we’ll have to deal with Agent Coulson and his merry band of jack-booted thugs again. They’ve already stolen Eric! Who knows what they’d do with us this time around?”

“Then we just let him go? The moment we undo those ropes Janey, I can  _guarantee_ you he’ll be out those doors in ten seconds flat and it’s the last we’ll ever see of him. It’s  _twenty-ten!_ He’s got no documentation, no money and no  _idea_ how to fend for himself out there.”

Bucky bristles at the implications there. “I can take care of myself just fine,” he snaps, but Darcy brushes his ire away like it means nothing. She pulls the rectangle thing out of her pocket and dangles it in front of his face. “Do you even know what this is?”

Bucky stares at it. The surface is blank now, and he wonders where the photograph from before has gone. Stubbornly, he stays silent, and he hates the smug gleam in her eyes when he does. She presses a long, thin button on its side, the glass lights up with- he blinks in surprise. It’s an image of Darcy, holding a puppy, both grinning. Superimposed over them is the time, which a cursory glance at the clock on the desk confirms as correct. It’s… remarkable (and so very,  _very_ amazing).

“What-”

“It’s a cell phone,” she tells him. She takes back the cell phone, tapping at the glass with a long, slender finger. “Presumably, you’ve been gone for sixty-five years; there’s  _a lot_ of technological and cultural advances you know nothing about. The Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, globalisation, the UN, computers,  _the internet!_ There’s a plethora of things you have no idea about, and if you just up and run, you will be less than useless.”

“I resent that statement.”

“Doesn’t make it less true.  _Christ,_ Janey- he doesn’t even know about Hiroshima or Nagasaki!”

He looks at Jane helplessly, but the woman just shrugs. “She’s got a point.”

“So you’ll just hold me captive?” he asks in outrage.

“Of course not,” Darcy says. There’s a canny glint in her eye that Bucky’s not entirely sure what to think of. “That would be unlawful imprisonment. But it’s obvious you’ll do a runner as soon as those bindings are gone… so how about we make a deal?”

He raises a brow, and the corner of her lips twitch. Now that he’s calmed down a bit and she seems to be acting more reasonable, he can’t help but notice how lovely a dame she is. “What kinda deal you talking ‘bout, doll?”

Darcy blinks several times in quick succession. She clears her throat as her neck flushes slightly, and no small part of him is satisfied to see his charm is still effective in the twenty-first century. “Uh- well, we’ll let you free, and you can stay here, if you’d like. Who knows how permanent this timey-wimey thing is, but you’d be better off learning about the particulars of the last sixty-odd years from us than someone else.”

“Wha- Darcy!” Jane says, staring at the other woman, aghast. “We can’t just keep him!”

“Why the hell not? It’s not like we don’t have the space now that Eric’s gone and disappeared himself!”

“We can’t afford to feed him!” she hisses, and Bucky so acutely reminded of Steve that his heart feels like it’s going to tear itself out of his chest. God-  _Steve_ \- what’s he even done in the last sixty years? Bucky is suddenly struck by the realisation. He’s been dead for sixty-five years. Most of the people he knows will be dead- Becky, Steve, Agent Carter, Howard, the Howlies. He’d double over with grief if it weren’t for the damn ropes. The women argue in hushed voices in front of him, but Bucky ignores them. Everything. He’s lost  _everything. He shoulda just died-_

“So what do you say?”

He looks up, and something must show on his face, because Darcy bites her lip and looks away for a moment. Bucky squares his jaw and ruthlessly suppresses the wave of grief for another time, but he still struggles to put two coherent thoughts together. “I can’t just live with the two of you,” he rasps. Irritation flickers across Darcy’s face.

“Why not?”

“Because… ‘cause it’d be inappropriate?”

Jane bites her lip in poorly-veiled amusement, but Darcy just raises an unimpressed brow. “Hate to break it to you Barnes, but standards have changed radically over the last sixty years.” Her lips quirk. “Besides, we could do with an extra hand around the place,” her gaze rakes up and down him, clear appreciation in her eyes, “you look like you’re good at lifting things off high places.”

“And what about money? I can’t just mooch offa ya for who knows how long.”

“Eh,” Darcy says, brushing aside his concern with a wave of her hand. “If it really troubles you, there’s probably a job or two available around the place, though you’ll probably have to compete with the kids around the place for the position. But I can pick up my old job pretty easily, and Jane’s funding easily covers the rest.”

It ain’t right, Bucky thinks. He can’t just live with these women and expect them to pay for everything, and the very thought of it turns Bucky’s stomach, but… “Those standards…” he murmurs, suddenly curious. “Just how much have they changed?”

Darcy and Jane grin at him, their smiles equally wicked and only a little intimidating. “Oh man, this will be so much  _fun,_ ” she says. Her gaze lingers guiltily on his bindings, still firmly in place. “Uh- but first, maybe we should get you out of those ropes.”

He smiles gratefully. “Thank-you.”

Darcy gives him a tight smile and hands her weapon over to Jane before moving over to him. She smells faintly of something floral and woodsy that inexplicably reminds him of his ma. “At the very least,” she murmurs, crouching down to undo one of the knots at the back of the chair, “don’t get run over like the last one did.”

Bucky… doesn’t know how to respond to that. Darcy doesn’t say anything else, and she works quickly, undoing the skilfully tied knots with deft fingers. As soon as Bucky feels the last one go slack, he’s up and away, skirting around Jane with whatever the hell that pistol is meant to be, and out the door before the women can even register what he’s doing. He thuds into the wall opposite the door as he goes before getting full control of his limbs and ignores the throbbing in his head. He’s never really tried to measure the full extent of his new strength- too intent on hiding it from everyone (hiding it from  _Steve) -_ and to run helter-skelter now is an oddly invigorating experience.

“ _Damn_ he moves fast!” Bucky hears Darcy remark to Jane as he leaves, and he sprints through a large, glass filled room filled with all sorts of technology that seems familiar and foreign all at once. It’s not until he’s outside- and  _damn but it is hot-_ that he realises he just ran out of the building without his boots on. He pauses, the heat of the concrete already burning through his socks, and squints around him. It’s so  _bright_ \- judging by the position of the sun it’s just past midday- and  _hot._ The sweltering heat is such a brilliant shock from the comfortable temperature of before, and the biting cold of the Alps that it sends him reeling.

Bucky grits his teeth and spares a glance at the building- walls of glass and metal and concrete. He doesn’t think the women will come after him, but he can’t be sure.

He runs.

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky ends up some time later back in Puente Antiguo, panting from exertion and the heat, and stoically ignores the strange looks the other pedestrians offer him as they walk past.

The tiny township is a mess. There are boarded windows and destroyed homes and storefronts everywhere. Down the main strip, he sees long score marks in the asphalt and charred wounds in brickwork that strongly remind him of Hydra and their otherworldly weapons. For a moment, Bucky can almost convince himself that he’s just in another war-torn town in Europe, but there are too many things wrong with that image; the ground is too red and dry, the sun is too hot and the cars are too sleek and quiet.

It’s like a slap in the face, and Bucky ends up curled up in a gutter behind a weird-looking grocer, covering his head with his arms as he fights the urge to hyperventilate. Too much- it’s too much. He breathes in shakily, unsure if it’s sweat or tears stinging in the corner of his eyes. Everything- everyone he ever loved. Grown old and dead and gone and here he is, stuck in a future he doesn’t understand when by all rights he should be dead too.

He hears the sound of footsteps, hesitating at the corner of the building, and Bucky looks up. Through his blurry vision, he sees Darcy, hovering uncertainly by the door marked ‘employees only’. He sniffs and wipes at his eyes with his sleeve, uncaring about the lack of decorum. She walks slowly towards him, sitting down in the gutter a short distance away.

“Hey,” she says quietly. Bucky stares at his feet, still clad in his now-filthy socks. The soles of his feet throb dully.

“Did we win?” he asks suddenly. Darcy starts, but she settles quickly, sighing as she rests her elbows on her knees.

“We did,” she says. “But a lot of innocent people died for it to happen.”

Bucky snorts with derision. “They always do,” he says, and swallows thickly. He clenches his fists, digging his fingernails into the flesh parts of his palms. “What- what happened to Steve? Steve Rogers? Do you know? They used to call him Captain America.”

Darcy is silent for a long time, and Bucky already knows what her answer is going to be. Even so, they hit him like a punch to the gut when she finally speaks. “I’m sorry,” she sighs, and his breath catches in his throat.  _No._ “The story goes that the day after you died, Captain Rogers flew a plane into the Arctic. They never found a body.”

He breathes out slowly and covers his eyes. “Fucking idiot,” he grits out. “Always gotta take the dramatic way out.”

If Darcy realises he’s crying, she at least has the decency to say nothing about it.

 

* * *

 

 

Darcy stays with him until he gets himself back under control, a quiet and steadfast presence at his side, and when he’s finished crying, she wordlessly offers him a plastic-wrapped packet of paper tissues. He blows his nose and scrubs his eyes, feeling a little more human by the time he throws them into the dumpster. Darcy makes an appreciative sound when they land flawlessly inside.

“Nice.”

He huffs. “I wasn’t a sniper for nothin’.”

“I can see that,” she drawls. They fall quiet again, and Bucky stares dully at the brick wall opposite them. There’s a scorch mark up near the roof.

“What happened here?”

“Officially, it was a gas leak.”

He snorts in derision. “Like hell it was. Really, what happened?”

Darcy looks at him from the corner of her eye, and the corner of her lips twitch. “That’s classified.”

He raises his brows in mute surprise. Come to think of it, Jane had said before that a time traveller wasn’t the strangest thing to happen to either of them, and he wonders what both women have experienced to leave them so blasé about his appearance. More to the point, he wonders who Shield is, and why they’re unwilling to get in contact with them.

“Did you want to go back?” Darcy asks. The expression on her face is unreadable when he turns to look at her. He nods and she stands with a heavy sigh, dusting off the back of her jeans whilst Bucky tries hard not to stare. Standards have changed, she’d said. Bucky wonders not for the first time how many she really meant.

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky doesn’t sleep that night. ‘Jet lag’ Darcy calls it when he stumbles down in the morning, and she pours him a generous mug of coffee, pushing over a carton of milk and a bowl of sugar.

“Thanks,” he says, almost as an afterthought. He feels… tired. Strung out. And though normally he can go a fair amount of time without sleep, he’s already been running low the last few days (in a different  _century,_ howzat?), and his ‘travels’ have hardly helped. Yet try as he might, he’d not managed a wink of sleep last night, spending the better part of the evening staring up at the ceiling.

Darcy grins at him over the rim of her own mug. “You hungry?”

Bucky considers the gnawing hunger in his gut; he’d eaten yesterday, but only sparingly, too caught up in himself to manage anything more than a few ascetic bites. “I could eat.”

“Poptarts?”

He stares at her blankly. “You know I don’t know what those are.”

She snickers and puts her mug down on the counter. The toaster is pulled out from somewhere, as is a blue cardboard box, and Darcy pulls a foil wrapped package from it, breaking it open to reveal two large rectangular cookies. He watches with mild confusion as she places them inside the toaster and turns it on. “Please don’t tell me you think that is a normal breakfast.”

Darcy stares back levelly. “Of course it’s not. But this is kind of a tradition, so humour me.”

“Fair enough.”

Darcy busies herself stacking away the plates and cutlery from the sink whilst they wait, and Bucky watches her work with a quiet efficiency. Every move she makes is comfortable and intuitive, as though she knows her way around the kitchen well. It’s almost like a dance, he’s amused to note as she twists on her heels and steps carefully, but it’s one meant for minimal effort rather than speed. She wears short cotton pants that barely reach her knees today, in a bright blue with misshapen cartoon pigs printed on them, and a plain black t-shirt that if anything accentuates her figure rather than hides it. Like everything else in this strange new century, she seems odd and almost uncomfortably forward, leaving Bucky unsure of how he’s meant to treat her.

Darcy, at least, doesn’t seem to notice, and when the toaster pops up (and at least  _that_ is familiar to him), she hums happily, dropping the poptarts on his plate gingerly, shaking out her fingers to disperse the heat of them.

“You’d best wait a bit; they’re too hot to eat right now,” she warns him as he eyes the poptarts speculatively. They’re frosted, and Bucky wonders absently how much sugar must be in them.

“Then why toast them at all?”

She sends him an appalled look. “Because untoasted poptarts are an affront against nature?”

“Right…” Bucky breaks one of them in half, noting the steam that rises from inside. Inside it’s filled with what may have once been strawberry jam. He sniffs it- definitely strawberry. Darcy watches him avidly, coffee sitting forgotten on the counter beside her. He raises an eyebrow. “Did you want some?”

She bites her lip to hold back a smile. “I’m good.”

“Right,” he says again, and feels a bit like an idiot when he bites the corner.

His eyes widen.  _Goddamn._

Darcy cackles like a madwoman when his next bite consumes more than half the tart itself, and pumps at the air with her fist. “Another convert!” she crows, and Bucky rolls his eyes at her antics, but doesn’t let it distract him from the sugary piece of goodness in his plate. Hot, crunchy and sweet, with an undercurrent of artificial strawberry that tastes mostly okay; it’s the first truly sweet thing he’s had since Christmas, when they’d feasted on chocolate, steamed pudding and bottles of Coca-Cola , cooled in the snow outside their barracks .

“S’not bad,” he admits. Darcy sends him an unimpressed look and he takes another bite. She smiles at him approvingly, and her attention returns to her coffee. They sit in relative silence, Bucky working through the rest of the box of poptarts (it’s been  _a long time_ since he last had something as overwhelmingly sweet and dammit if he isn’t going to make the most of it) whilst Darcy looks at something on her cell phone. She’d explained the basic functions of it to him last night, and the entire concept of that little piece of black glass and plastic both amazes and boggles him. To have that much knowledge and information compressed into such a tiny device… well suffice to say he’s never wanted anything more in his life.

“How are you doing?” she asks eventually, when the wreckage of several poptart wrappers lie in front of him and his stomach starts to regret his ‘meal’. Bucky clenches his jaw and stares down at the counter.

“I…” for a time, he contemplates lying, but there’s something about Darcy that makes him want to be truthful with her. “Not great.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

He pulls a face. “Not really.”

Darcy hums, and when he spares a glance at her, she’s watching him with an infuriatingly calm look on her face. “Well if you do want to talk…” she looks down at her empty mug and runs a finger around the rim, “Jane and I are always willing to listen. This whole thing… it’s gotta suck.”

His laugh is sharp and mirthless. “That’s an understatement.” Darcy stays silent, watching him, and Bucky feels the inexplicable urge to keep talking. “I don’t know what to do… I fell. I was  _falling._ I was  _meant to die,_ I know I was.” He snorts, and stares darkly at the crumbs on his plate. “That train was meant to be the end of the line for me, but it wasn’t. Instead I end up here, and everything is new and shiny and so far removed from- well, everything. Everything I’ve ever known. The war’s over- but it ain’t for me. Yesterday, I was gonna die, and the war was still goin’ strong. But today… it’s over. It’s all  _over._ Everything’s-” he breaks off. There’s this ache in his chest that won’t go away, no matter how hard he rubs at his ribs. “Everything’s gone. And I feel like I should- I don’t know, go back there. Finish what we started, but… everything’s  _already_ finished. It’s been done for sixty years.”

Bucky leans over the counter, holding his head between his hands as he speaks, half-wondering where all these words come from in the first place. “What was the point of even fighting?” he asks in a small voice. He doesn’t even know who the question is meant to be directed to. “What was the point of all that misery, if I’d never get to see the end of it?”

The kitchen falls quiet again. All Bucky can hear is his own thready breathing, his pulse a steady beat beneath his hands. He laughs wetly. “And you know the worst thing? Part of me is so…  _relieved._ I’m  _glad_ be outta that hell, the cost of it don’t matter. An’ I don’t know how to deal with that thought.”

He sits there staring at the counter for a long time, all the things he’d thought about last night at the forefront of his mind. When he finally gets the guts to sneak a look at Darcy, he sees her staring solemnly down at her mug. It’s still almost half full.

“I… can’t pretend I know what you’re going through.” she says eventually. Bucky’s breath escapes him in a heaving gush of air and he swallows thickly. “Did you  _want_ to go home?”

“I don’t know.” The sugar of the poptarts have soured in his mouth. A good part of him doesn’t know why he even started talking;  _shoulda just kept it bottled all inside like usual._

A calculating look enters Darcy’s eyes. “I could- there’s a guy I know who could maybe help, if you wanted. No guarantees, of course. He’s smart, but even time travel could escape him.”

Bucky shrugs. He doesn’t know what to feel about the possibility of being able to go back. “Worth a try,” he says. “Thanks.”

Darcy smiles, but the gesture doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It may be the most we can do, I’m afraid. I wish I could give you an explanation or a way back home, but Jane and I are fresh out of miracles.”

He snorts. “Wasn’t askin’ for one, doll. I’ve had my fair share of miracles too, an’ the one thing I do know about them is they always leave a bad taste in yer mouth.”

She smiles wryly. “Preach,” she says. Bucky stores the odd turn of phrase away for later. The lingo alone in this new century is going to have him tied up in all sorts of knots, he can tell. “At the very least, I can offer you a way to make the most of the twenty-first century.”

“Yeah?” he asks, brow raised. “Howsat?”

From the pocket of her strange blue pants, Darcy fishes out a cell phone and places it gently down on the counter. It’s slightly chunkier than hers, and the plastic around it is an eye-searing neon pink. He tugs it towards him, pressing the button on the side like Darcy taught him, but it doesn’t light up. “What’s this?”

“It’s your new cell phone,” Darcy says proudly. “Or at least, it’s Jane’s old one. It’s not turned on- it doesn’t have a SIM card yet- and the battery is a bit dodgy, but it’ll work for your purposes. We’ll go out later today to buy you a SIM for it.”

He stares at the hand-me-down phone. “Out of curiosity… how much did this thing cost?”

“Hm- oh, only about two-hundred, I think. My roommate had the same model.”

His mouth falls open, aghast. “Two-  _two hundred dollars?”_ He pushes the phone gingerly away from him. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you just  _give_ that to me!”

Darcy pushes the phone back to him, looking bemused. “Of course you can; it may as well be used- no one around here has any need of it.”

“Then sell it! Jesus doll, money like that can’t just sit around and do nothing!”

“Bucky,” she says, and damn her but she looks unnecessarily amused by his horror. “Just take the phone. And while you’re at it, there’re these fun things called inflation and inbuilt obsolescence that I think you should know about. It’s worth  _far_ less than you think it is.”

Bucky picks up the device mulishly, though secretly he’s pleased, for all that it would have taken him years to save up enough to buy something worth so much. So much information at his fingertips… the thought sends pleasant shivers up and down his spine.  “How do you turn it on?”

Darcy plucks it from his fingers- her skin is cool when it brushes against his- and shows him the other button. “Hold this down until it vibrates.” She passes it back and he does as he’s told, eyebrows rising in surprise when it vibrates in his hand. “You can’t use it properly without a SIM though. As it is now, it’s mostly just a glorified music player, camera and note taker.”

Bucky’s eyes bulge. “It does  _what?”_

Darcy laughs, biting her plush bottom lip. “Much to learn you still have, my young padawan.”

Bucky sighs heavily and rubs at his eyes with his free hand. Yeah, these strange turns of phrase are gonna catch him out a lot.

 

* * *

 

 

The future, despite his circumstances, is  _swell._ Computers? Amazing. The internet? Wonderful.  _Google?_ An absolute Godsend.

“Darcy,  _Darcy!_ Did you know that if you put Saturn in a glass of water, it would float? Or that if you talked in space you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself because there’s no air?”

“That’s cool Bucky,” Darcy says, humouring him, gaze not lifting from her laptop. Bucky eyes the thing covetously. He  _craves_ one; there’s only so much functionality to a phone, and he has to keep charging it every few hours thanks to the dicky battery and his constant use.

Jane watches him speculatively from across the room. Her hands are smudged with marker, and the whiteboard beside her is strewn with strings of incomprehensible maths that Bucky wishes he knew how to decode. He was always the good one when it came to math. “You really like all the space science stuff, don’t you?”

He sends her an incredulous look. “Of course I do. How could you  _not?_ Space is…”

“Awesome?”

“Incomprehensible. Infinite. Immeasurable.”

“Enough of the adjectives dude. Space is cool. We get it,” Darcy drawls, rolling her eyes at him. “Jane’s an astrophysicist, remember? That kind of shit is her  _jam._ Come to me when you wanna speak modern history, but Jane’s our resident genius when it comes to space things.”

Jane pinks slightly and busies herself with her whiteboard when he turns back to send her a pleading look. “I wouldn’t say  _that.”_

“Well you certainly know more than the rest of us,” Darcy remarks, and pokes her tongue out at her friend. “Man, who would have thought Bucky Goddamn Barnes would be such a  _nerd.”_

Jane snorts, and she drops her marker into an empty coffee mug and flips the whiteboard over. “Come here,” she orders, and Bucky drops his phone on the table and slouches over to her, hands creeping into the pockets of his too-big jeans (they’ve still not been around to buying him some new clothes, and Bucky’s unwilling to just  _ask,_ acutely aware of just how much these two women have been doing for him). Jane grabs another marker and begins drawing a series of different sized circles. “If you want to learn about space, we may as well start with baby steps first. Let’s talk about the solar system…”

 

* * *

 

 

“Here.”

Bucky looks up from his book. Its pages are dog-eared and careworn, bought at the book-store down the road. Jane had said it was a kid’s book, but Darcy had insisted he read it; something about catching up with pop culture. In the end, he’s thankful she did- he’s enjoying it far more than he thought he would.

He stares curiously at the plastic folder dropped onto the cushion beside him. “What’s this?”

Darcy throws herself onto the sofa. The folder bounces with her momentum, but Bucky is used to her dramatics by now. “That, my time-travelling friend, is your new identity.”

He raises a brow and sets the book aside, picking the folder up gingerly. Bucky pulls out a plastic driver’s license. The corners of the card are rounded and he runs his fingers over the edges thoughtfully. “James Brian Bennet?”

“I thought it might help if you kept the same initials, and James is common enough for you to get away with it.”

“Hmm.”

“What?” Darcy asks, sounding displeased with his lack of reaction. “This is a damn sight better than anything you could do, buddy. If you don’t like it you can shove it up your-”

“It’s not that,” he says hastily. He laughs and Darcy’s scowl deepens. “It’s just- I’m surprised you didn’t put something- you know-”

“Something rude?” He nods and her expression clears. She chuckles. “I’ll admit, I  _did_ contemplate looking for an acronym for JERK, but joke names stick in people’s minds too much. If you’re trying to forge a new identity, it’s best to go for something boring, but not  _too_ boring.” She points at the rest of the documents in the folder. “There’s nothing too special in there- just your new social security number, a ‘copy’ of your birth certificate and a few other things. Just stuff to help you out, you know?”

He grins at her. “This is great, Darcy. Seriously; you didn’t have to do this.”

Darcy cheeks turn pink and she glances away. “It’s nothing,” she says and he shakes his head in disbelief. “For most things they should be fine, like getting a job or buying things, but they won’t stand up to the strictest of scrutiny, so don’t go getting yourself arrested any time soon.”

“I’ll try my hardest not to,” he laughs and Darcy bites her lip, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “But really; thank-you.”

“It’s no problem,” she blusters and Bucky shakes his head, bemused. He glances back down at his new license, squinting suspiciously at the picture. It’s definitely a photograph of him, but Bucky has no memory of it being taken. He looks sullen and churlish and his hair is a  _tragedy_ …

“How did you get this picture?” he asks suspiciously. Darcy coughs, as though trying to hide her laughter and his eyes narrow.

“That, my friend, is a secret that you shall never know the answer to.”

“This looks like you took it first thing in the morning.”

Her eyes dart to the side. Bucky shoves at her lightly and she giggles. It’s the first girlish sound he’s heard her make and he laughs. “I look cock-eyed.”

She snorts, and he loves the way her eyes crinkle up in the corners as she laughs at him. “Hate to tell you Barnes, but you always look that way.”

Bucky scowls and flattens his hair self-consciously. “You think you’re smart, doncha?”

She smirks. “Bucko, I  _know_ I’m smart. Don’t need a man to tell me that.”

He regards her for a long moment, smiling at her faintly. “Yeah,” he says. “I ‘spose you don’t.”

 

* * *

 

 

A week after Bucky’s appearance, Jane announces that they’re going back out into the desert. Darcy groans and flops down next to him on the sofa, and Bucky glances between them, confused.

“What for?” he asks. Darcy sighs heavily and her head rolls on her shoulder to look at him.

“It’s for Jane’s sciencey stuff. You can’t do it from here because there’s too much interference, so we take the van and go out at night to the desert to get readings and observe- well, who knows what... I’m a political science student, not an astrophysicist.”

He raises a brow. “Seems a bit of an odd match up.”

She shrugs. “I needed the science credits to graduate and I was the only applicant. After- well. Afterwards, I just kind of… stuck around for Janey…” her voice goes low, and she glances cagily over at Jane, but the other woman is distracted by something on her computer. “If you ask me, she’s still just chasing after rainbows, but if it helps her cope…”

“Cope with what?”

“Secret,” Darcy says solemnly, and she taps her nose.

“… Right,” Bucky says. He’s confused; but then again he’s confused by most things these days. “And what does this usually involve?”

“Well for us, it means driving around in a shitty van in the middle of the night and trying not to fall asleep. Maybe a little notetaking or moving some equipment around. So it’ll be great having you around,” she lightly punches his arm, the look in her eyes nakedly appreciative. “You look like you could bench-press half the things in the van. Or the van itself. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Thanks?”

“For Jane, it mostly involves staring forlornly up at the sky, these days. Sometimes, on the good nights, she stares up at it  _angrily.”_

“I heard that!” Jane calls out. She doesn’t look up from her computer and Darcy snickers. “I am  _not_ pining!”

“Never said you were, Boss-Lady.”

Bucky thinks it wise not to comment that she certainly implied it.

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky sighs heavily, staring out at the night sky framed by the open doors of Jane’s van. The stars are out in abundance this far out in the desert, and he thinks they’re the only people for miles around.

He likes the desert; there’s a serenity to the place that he’s never found before. A peace in the quiet solitude of the night; a soft hush that falls upon him, now that Darcy and Jane are focused on one of their machines. The night is cool but not freezing- nothing like the frozen winters of Europe or New York- but Bucky wears a jacket and a scarf borrowed from Darcy to ward off the cold anyway. The scarf holds faint traces of her woodsy perfume, and Bucky sniffs at it contentedly when he thinks she’s not looking.

The irritated sounds of Darcy and Jane’s conversation turns to relief, whatever issue with the equipment now fixed, and Darcy joins him in the van, hauling a computer into her lap. He watches numbers run down the screen, but they mean little to him, and he turns his attentions to Darcy. Her face- lit by the dull light of the laptop- takes on an eerie shade of green, and she bites her plush lower lip as she works. Bucky sighs again, staring out at the stars beyond.

“Bored?”

He glances back at her, but her gaze is glued to the computer screen and he turns back to watch the skies. “A little. It’s nice out here though.”

“I always loved how many stars you can see.”

“Yeah… they’re beautiful.”

“I grew up in the city; never left the place until I got my internship with Jane. Seeing them that first time… it was something else. Jane laughed at me a lot those first few days.”

Bucky thinks back to his own first time, out on basic. He’d not been the only one to stare up at the sky in awe that first night. “I can attest to that,” he says wryly.

They fall silent. Beyond them, Bucky spies the dark form of a Cottontail venturing nervously beyond a shrub, and he watches it hop across the ground, mindful of Jane’s presence some distance away. He smiles.

“Why did you believe me?” he asks suddenly, and Darcy  _does_ glance up at him then, an eyebrow raised in question. “When I said I was from 1945. What made you believe me?”

“Well what made you believe  _us?”_

“I asked first.”

“Haven’t you ever heard the old saying ‘ladies first’?”

He rubs at his face tiredly, but can’t stop himself from laughing at her. She’s such a strange dame. “It was your technology. Seemed bit hard to fabricate, and pointless if you wanted to interrogate me.”

She bites back a smile and stares back down at her computer. “It was your face, for us. Jane was the one who thought you’d travelled forwards though. I was all for human cloning, but she shot that theory down, and besides, the  _why_ of that theory was a little weak.” She looks up again, studying him seriously. “If you  _aren’t_ him… well, I don’t know how you managed it but you’re the spitting image of him. It’s quite remarkable, really.”

“I can assure you,” he grins. “I am definitely Bucky Barnes.”

“That’s exactly what a Bucky Barnes impersonator would say,” she says slyly. He laughs again.

“And what the real Bucky Barnes would say too, I’d imagine.”

“Ha. You’ve got me there, I guess.”

He grins, before sobering. “When you said I wasn’t their weirdest thing to happen to you… what did you mean by that?”

Darcy sighs heavily. She looks out across the desert ruefully. “I can’t tell you that- I’m sorry. No one in town can; our hands are legally tied.”

He holds his hands up in placation. “It’s fine doll. I’m just curious, is all.”

She snorts. “Well who wouldn’t be? Turn up in a town that looks like the gods have played a game of tag down the main road? Who wouldn’t want to know what happened?”

“It’s true. Must have been quite recent though…”

“ _Bucky,_ ” she says warningly. He chuckles.

“Alright, Darcy. I can take a hint.”

The line of her shoulders eases in relief and she turns back to her work. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” she says eventually. “Chances are you’ll learn all about it soon enough.”

Bucky hums, and tries not to think of how that sounds vaguely ominous.

 

* * *

 

 

He hears the guttural grumble of the engine long before he sees it. Bucky looks up from the sandwiches he’s been meticulously making for the three of them, and watches as a sleek sports car perched low to the ground pulls up in front of the old car dealership. It is a lurid shade of orange, but Bucky finds he rather likes the angular shapes of it; it looks more like a sculpture than something that should be driven.

“Um,” he says, and Darcy looks up from her computer in surprise. Her gaze falls on the car and she snorts, rolling her eyes violently.

“Honestly,” she groans, “that man wouldn’t understand subtlety if it danced the Nutbush naked in front of him.”

He frowns at her. “Who?”

Darcy’s answering grin is brilliant but fleeting, and she storms over to the front door, swinging it open with more force than is truly necessary (which is saying something, coming from Bucky), and a wave of hot, dry air sweeps into the room. Bucky hovers in the doorway, sheltered from the afternoon sun.

“Hey old man!” she calls out as the driver’s door opens. “Did you not have any other cars? Couldn’t have just picked one of the SUV’s?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, kid,” a voice replies, and a man slides out of the car, brushing away the faint creases in his suit pants. “Those things aren’t nearly ostentatious enough.”

The man embraces Darcy with a familiarity that really shouldn’t surprise Bucky as much as it does. He looks to be in his late-forties to fifties, with dark hair and goatee. Bucky thinks he would be handsome if he weren’t so haggard and careworn, and he suspects that underneath those sunglasses of his are bags big enough to fit half of Steve’s USO girls’ shit in. Darcy must notice too, because she hugs him before pulling back to study him critically. “Dad wasn’t kidding about that whole reactor thing. You look like shit.”

“Thanks kiddo,” the man drawls, sarcasm in every layer of his voice. “Your delicacy never fails to amaze.”

She shrugs, unrepentant. “I learnt from the best.”

“Unfortunately,” he mutters, and he closes the door behind him with firm flick of his wrist.  “How’s my favourite fake-niece?”

“Better than my favourite fake-uncle,” Darcy replies without hesitation. “And prettier to boot.”

Bucky bites the inside of his cheek to hold back his amusement when said fake-uncle clutches at his chest in fake-distress. He steps out of the shade when Darcy motions to join them. The man blanches at the sight of him, and whips his sunglasses off. “Holy hell,” he breathes, and he draws in close, inspecting Bucky with fascination. “He’s the spitting image, isn’t he?”

Bucky scowls at him. There’s something familiar about the man, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. The sharp glint in his eye kind of reminds him of Howard, though, and a cursory glance of the number plate on the-

“Aw jeez, you’re Howard’s boy, aren’t you?”

Something unreadable flickers across his face, but his answer is glib. “Sure am, Boy Wonder, but forgive me if I don’t jump up and down to meet someone who knew daddy dearest. Tony Stark.” He doesn’t give a hand to shake so Bucky doesn’t offer one.

“Bucky Barnes. And Howard was kind of an asshole, so I don’t blame you. Brilliant, but an asshole.”

He raises a brow and Bucky wonders if he read the situation wrong. “Funny, most people like to focus on the former.”

He shrugs. “Stark didn’t have much time for anyone but Carter or Steve. Heart eyes.”

If anything, Stark seems to brighten. “Oh, I  _like_ him,” he says. “You can definitely keep him.”

“Thanks,” Darcy says dryly. “I’m so glad you approve.”

Stark wiggles his fingers at her. “Come on now, we’ve talked about disrespecting your elders.”

“ _Please,_ ” she snorts derisively. “The day I start heeding that rule is the day you start driving a four door sedan with a baby-on-board sticker on the back.”

Stark shudders and Bucky rolls his eyes at their dramatics, turning around to walk back inside. The others follow at a more sedate pace.

“What happened here, kiddo?” Stark asks as they walk. “This place looks like it’s been but through the wringer a few times.”

Darcy heaves a sigh. “My hands are tied there,” she says lowly, likely meaning to keep it private, but Bucky’s sharp hearing picks it up anyway. “You’d best talk to your buddies at Shield if you want to know.”

Stark sucks in a sharp breath of surprise, and Bucky watches him turn to stare at Darcy through their reflections on the glass door. “Darcy, wha-”

“That’s all I’m saying Tony. I’m pushing my luck as it is.”

“Does  _Rhodey_ know about your recent adventure?”

“What did I just say, Tony?”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Stark hisses, and Bucky pushes the door open, holding it out for the others to pass through before him. Darcy sends him a grateful smile as they pass and he winks at her. She bites her lip and glances away and he smiles to himself as he follow him inside.

“Oh hey Janey,” Darcy says, and Bucky realises that Jane must have emerged from her room. The woman stands in her pyjamas (Bucky got over the girls’ indecorum by about his third day, but he still gets caught out by it sometimes. He’s only human), staring at the three of them like a deer caught in the headlights.

“Darcy,” she says in a strained voice, “why is Tony Stark in our house?”

Darcy winces. “Shit- I forgot to tell you he was coming, didn’t I?”

Jane nods. “Yeah, I can safely say this is very much a surprise.”

“Right- uh, well, Jane, meet Tony Stark; he’s my stepfather’s best friend and honorary uncle. Tony, meet Jane Foster. She’s my boss and bestie, and not necessarily in that order.”

“Foster?” Stark says with undisguised interest. Bucky recognises that glint in his eyes. “The astrophysicist?”

“Um- yes?”

Stark grins, but Bucky doesn’t miss the fact that he doesn’t offer her a hand to shake either. “I’ve heard about you. Most of the academic community seems to think you’re a crackpot, but I’ve seen your work; it’s crazy enough to work, I think.”

Jane looks torn between wanting to be flattered and wondering if she should be insulted. “Thanks?”

He just shakes his head, the grin sliding into something more suave, and Bucky recognises  _that_ look too. What a schmuck. “Give it time, Foster. When those brown-nosers finally realise the genius you’ve been spouting they’ll be eating out of your hand.”

Jane preens a little at that. “Be nice if they could start doing that  _now._ Funding’s been kind of hard to get a hold of.”

Start shrugs off her concerns with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Never you mind that- we’ll fix that up later-”

“Um,  _what?”_

“-but first I’d really like to talk to your resident time traveller.”

Bucky straightens. “Shoot.”

Stark grins and begins circling him, Bucky crosses his arms and pokes at the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Tell me Barnes, what happened- from the moment you got on that train to the point where you ended up here?”

Bucky’s amusement slips away like ink on the water and he clenches his jaw tightly. “What do you want to know?”

“All of it- don’t go sparing the details Boy Wonder. I want to know  _how_ you managed a sixty-five year jump in time. If that’s even what really happened.”

Bucky bristles. “You callin’ me a liar?”

Stark rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Not necessarily. I’m saying that there are other ways you could have ended up here.”

Jane sucks in a sharp, surprised breath. “Of course!”

“For those in the room without PhD’s?” Darcy asks, sharing a commiserating look with Bucky.

“It’s possible that Bucky’s not even from this universe,” Jane says.

Bucky is still confused but understanding dawns on Darcy’s face. “He could be from an alternate universe?”

Bucky swallows thickly. And alternate universe? As in, he may not even belong in  _this_ one? Life just kept getting better.

Stark shrugs. “It’s just a theory, but it’s probably about as plausible as time travel. Could be we’ll never know, but we certainly won’t know if Barnes doesn’t start telling us what happened.”

Bucky breathes out heavily and stalks over to the dining table to sit down. The table’s rarely actually  _used_  for eating on; mostly it seems to be reserved for holding more of Jane’s work, leaving them to eat mostly at the kitchen counter, the sofa or the roof,  but Bucky kind of likes their informal dining setting. It reminds him of the Front.

Jane and Stark join him, but Darcy wanders into the kitchen to make them coffee and Bucky fiddles anxiously with a pen. Stark huffs impatiently. “So spill, Barnes. What happened?”

Bucky breathes in deep and slow, settling his nerves.  _Just like if you’re talking to your CO,_ he reminds himself. He spends the next twenty minutes carefully reciting every important detail he can think of, and plenty that aren’t. Stark listens carefully, only interrupting him on occasion. By the time he’s finished, Bucky feels drained. He kind of wants a poptart. Or a bottle of whiskey. It’s hard to separate the two.

“Well,” Stark says, leaning back in his chair. “That sounds  _way_ worse than the story my dad used to tell me as a kid.”

Beside him, Darcy is watching him with a pale face and sad eyes and Bucky turns away, unable to hold her gaze. It’s the first time he’s told the whole story to anyone, and it took everything in him to stop his voice from shaking in parts… the look on Steve’s face when the handlebar broke loose… he shakes his head, dispelling the image. It haunts him enough in his dreams, knowing that it would be the last time he’d ever see his face-

Bucky breathes out slowly. Blunt fingernails dig into the fleshy parts of his hands.

“So what do you think?” Jane asks Stark. “Could it have been the weapons?”

The older man shrugs. “Could be. Say, Barnes, what did you say those things were powered by again?”

Bucky glowers. “I didn’t.” He hesitates, unsure of how much he should be telling them. He trusts Darcy and Jane, but Stark- for all his relations to Howard- is still an unknown entity. Still… Darcy trusts him. “Schmitt had found this thing called the Tesseract; they were using it to power their weapons.” He shakes his head. The smell of burnt metal and ozone is etched into his memory and the sound of men screaming as they were hit still echoes in his skull when he sleeps. “Those things… we’d never seen anything like it before. You got hit and you were just… gone. Like you’d never existed in the first place.”

Stark nods knowledgeably, but the women just look curious. “I’ve heard of them. Nasty things. You said you were hit by one of those shots before you fell, right?”

“The shield deflected it. Threw me outta the train.”

Stark hums. “Well my best bet is the beam interacted with the shield- gave it a delayed reaction maybe. Of course, there could be environmental factors involved- it might be there’s some kind of wormhole or rift that you fell into- probably temporary, likely one-sided, otherwise we probably would have noticed it earlier.”

“Could you recreate it to send him back?”

He snorts. “Well for one, I’d need one of those Hydra weapons- which were supposedly all destroyed, but I doubt it- or the Tesseract itself, but I don’t even know if they ever found it. I’d have to go through my father’s journals. Then we’d need Rogers’ shield, which went down with his plane,” Bucky flinches at the mention of Steve, “because Vibranium is obscenely expensive and it’d be more or less impossible to get enough to recreate one- and that’s  _me_ saying that.”

Darcy rolls her eyes, but there’s a tension in her eyes that Bucky almost misses. “But theoretically you could do it?”

Stark shrugs. “Theoretically? Maybe. But that’s a pretty optimistic maybe. There’s no guarantee we’d send you back to 1945. And if you  _did_ go back to 1945, then you’d still be falling to you death. And that just assuming that you’ve only travelled in time. If it’s another universe than it’s a different kettle of fish entirely.”

“So… you can’t do it?” Bucky asks tentatively. Stark gives him a disdainful look.

“Oh, I could do it,” he scoffs. Bucky raises an eyebrow. “The question is, do you really  _want_ me to? It might take a bit of finagling, and I’d probably have to break into Shield to find a Hydra weapon, but it could be done. You just need to be aware of the risks involved if you go through with this; there’s no guarantee you get out alive.” Stark studies him shrewdly, his sharp eyes seeming to cut into his very soul. “You’ve got to ask yourself… do you really want to go back.”

Bucky is quiet for a long time. He doesn’t know the answer to that question… a part of him wants to go back  _desperately,_ wants to go  _home,_ but with every passing day, home seems to creep further away. And with Steve gone… the grief of it all is so sharp, an aching pit in the space between his ribs. He doesn’t know if he could bear to go back; not after everything he’s seen. Not after knowing what life can be like.

“I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I… can I think on it?”

“Sure you can,” Stark says; he’s already got a distracted look on his face, pulling out his phone and tapping away at it. Bucky excuses himself from the table; he knows he’s probably being rude, but from what he’s observed in the two weeks, Darcy and Jane don’t seem to care.

He can feel Darcy’s eyes on him as he leaves, and Bucky wonders what she thinks of all this as he flees to the rooftop. The heat of it is searing, almost blisteringly hot, but Bucky likes the view of the town and the desert beyond, and there’s a plastic box left beside the aging neon sign full of blankets that he throws over the corrugated iron before he sits at the edge of the roof.

He sits quietly, a lofty observer watching the people of Puente Antiguo go about their day. He wonders what their lives must be like, what minor grievances they have to deal with, what joy they take from life. Such normality seems an impossibility; even Darcy and Jane aren’t exactly normal- not by his standards (or anyone else’s, he suspects). Most nights of the last week shave been spent out in the desert, surrounded by machinery that confuses Bucky, keeping Darcy company whilst Jane goes ‘chasing after rainbows’.

At some point, Stark’s car drives away; his exit is loud and flashy to match his ritzy car, and Bucky rolls his eyes at the display. He watches the car take the main road straight out of town, the orange hovering in the distant heat mirage, as though floating on the air.

“I didn’t know he’d come today,” Darcy says, and Bucky jumps in surprise. She creeps up on him more often than not. “I didn’t think he’d turn up at all, to be honest.”

Bucky turns around. Darcy squints in the bright afternoon sun, and she takes a broad-brimmed straw hat from the box. “He’s a lot like his father,” he remarks, and Darcy grimaces at him.

“Don’t tell Tony that- jeez.”

Bucky snorts. “I can understand why it might be a sore spot. Stark was a good man, but I doubt he’d have made a good father. Too much focus on the wrong things.”

“No,” Darcy hums. “From what little I get from dad, he was pretty shit.” She motions down beside him. “Care if I join you?”

Bucky snorts again and taps at the blanket beside him. “Go ahead,” he says and Darcy smiles as she sprawls down beside him. She sighs heavily and lies down, letting the hat cover her face. Bucky thinks it’s a bit of a moot point; her jeans today are cut off just a couple of inches below the junction of her thighs, and there’s nothing to protect that pale expanse of leg from the sun. He averts his gaze, turning his attention back to the main strip. Across the road, Izzy cleans the glass outside her diner, and a young couple walk a dog, smiling and laughing at each other as they go.

“So,” she says from beneath her hat, “did you wanna talk about it?”

Bucky stares blankly down the main road. “Not really.”

“You can trust Tony,” Darcy says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her fingers twitch where they rest on her stomach. “He’s a good egg- an idiot considering how smart he is, but a good man all the same. He’ll do right by you, though I don’t know how long it might take for him to manage it.”

He hums. Bucky wonders at the easy camaraderie he’s found with her; there is something so  _easy_ about Darcy, for all her outlandish fashions and radical (for him, at any rate) new opinions. They clash sometimes; Bucky, for all that he thinks himself quite open-minded, is still often caught out by how much things have changed, and Darcy is never one to shirk from proving him wrong. But if anything, he likes her irreverence. Appreciates it, even.

“Do you miss it?”

He glances back down at her, but Darcy’s face is still obscured by her hat. “Miss what?”

“Home. The fourties.”

He snorts. “Well I certainly don’t miss the war,” he says wryly. Darcy lightly hits his thigh, and her touch sends a thrill of  _something_ straight down to his toes. He sighs heavily. “I miss the people… but not the place.”

Darcy leans up onto an elbow, tilting the hat back to sit properly on her head. She wears no makeup today, and her eyes look pale and washed out in the brightness of the day. The skin beneath her eyes is a faint tint of blue. She looks tired. “Hey,” he says lowly, recalling the troubled look on her face when they were talking to Stark, “penny for your thoughts?”

Darcy huffs, head tilted down to hide her face with the wide brim of her hat. “I don’t want you to go back,” she confesses quietly. Bucky sucks in a sharp breath of surprise and Darcy looks up at him, the look on her face almost  _shy._ “I know that makes me a terrible person… but I can’t help it. I just… don’t.”

He smiles. Emboldened, he reaches out to brush his thumb lightly over the fragile skin beneath her eyes, and Darcy’s eyelids flutter closed at the touch. “I don’t know if I really belong here,” he says, voice careful. “Not yet. But I don’t know if I’d belong back  _there_ either. And… I don’t know… I get this feeling sometimes… this fear of what happens if I do go back and I survive the fall?”

Darcy looks up at him confusedly and Bucky removes his hand. His skin feels cold. “How could you survive the fall?”

He shrugs, glancing away. “I don’t know,” he lies. He’s still told no one about the thing that Zola made him. Probably never will. “I just- sometimes I worry, I guess.”

Darcy sits up properly, body twisting on the blanket so she faces him as she speaks. “You don’t- you don’t have to go back, you know. Not if you don’t want to. As far as the world is concerned, you died. You played your part. The world never forgot the sacrifices you made.” Darcy’s hand creeps over to his, and she tentatively brushes her pinky over his. Her touch sends a frisson of energy up his arm and he tucks his finger over hers, revelling at the connection.

“I paid my dues, didn’t I?”

“Yes Bucky,” Darcy say vehemently. “A thousand times over. All of you did.”

He breathes out shakily and closes his eyes. “I never wanted to go to war,” he tells her, and the confession feels like a sin, laid out at Darcy’s feet for her perusal. “That was always Steve’s thing; fight the good cause, kill some Nazi’s… when he asked me to stay and fight… how could I say no? But all I wanted was to go home, like a- like a fucking  _coward_.” he spits out his words towards the end, disgusted with himself for even thinking it, but it’s as though once he starts, he can’t stop himself. “Just turn tail and run back to America and pretend nothing had ever happened. And now I’m here and it feels like a damn godsend, and I  _hate_ myself for thinkin’ that!”

“Oh,” Darcy says softly, “Oh Bucky,  _no._ You’re  _not_ a coward- you’re  _not!_ ” She shifts onto her knees and reaches out to hold his face between her hands. Bucky startles at the move, caught out by her brazenness and he stares at her, startled, before sagging into her touch.  _Fuck it,_ he thinks. _Today’s a bust anyway._

“I’m just so tired,” he murmurs and Darcy bites her bottom lip. “I just want somewhere to belong again.”

“Here,” she insists, and her fingers dig softly into the line of his jaw. “You can belong  _here. Fuck_ the nineteen-fourties! They had their chance; let the twenty-first century have you now.”

He laughs shakily. “You’re a strange one, you know that?”

“A few people may have mentioned it.” She smiles softly at him, and something in his chest jumps a little at the intensity of her gaze. She suddenly seems much closer than he’d realised, and he thinks he could count every pale freckle on her cheeks. There’s a darker one on the upper line of her lips too and his breathe catches in his chest. He feels like a teenager again, fumbling with Gracie O’Brien beneath the stairs to her building.

When Darcy closes the space between them, the warm touch of her lips to his is no surprise. He closes his eyes and clutches at her wrists, running his thumbs over her pulse points. Her lips move insistently over his and Bucky lets her take charge of the kiss for a long and languorous moment, before running his hands down her arms, cupping her elbows lightly. He presses forward, tongue brushing across her upper lip, and his hands slide further as her breath hitches, hands spread against her ribs.

Darcy pulls back and Bucky mourns her absence, but she only throws a leg over to straddle him. Her lips meet his again and he chuckles against them. Almost against his will, one of his hands stray lower, brushing over a creamy thigh. Her skin is soft, but he can feel the faint prickle of shaved hair beneath his fingers. Darcy holds herself against him tightly as their kiss deepens, turning heated as her fingers twist into his hair, sending pleasant shivers down Bucky’s spine. She tastes faintly of sweetened coffee and he chases the taste. Darcy makes a soft sound- so quiet he’s scarcely sure he heard anything at all, but he wants to know what other sounds she might make, and his grip on her thigh tightens-

“Jesus Christ get a room!” someone calls out, and they break apart, shocked. They breathe heavily, the air between them heated, and Bucky watches several unreadable emotions cross her face before Darcy glances back and sends a rude gesture to Izzy across the road. He hears the older woman’s laughter, but his attention can’t seem to stray from Darcy, who turns back to grin at him. Her eyes glitter with mirth and there’s a bright flush on her cheeks, her lips red from kissing. She’s fucking beautiful.

“Hey,” he says, mouth suddenly dry. His hands are still on her- indecent by his standards- but he can’t bring himself to remove them, and Darcy doesn’t seem to much care.

“Hey yourself,” she smirks. He laughs softly and kisses her again, quick and fleeting and when he draws away, Darcy follows with an irritated sound. He looks pointedly behind her to the street beyond; most people aren’t paying attention to them, but he’s aware of how exposed they are.

“In hindsight, maybe not the best place to do this,” he says and Darcy rolls her eyes at him, pouting coquettishly.

“Who cares?” she says, blasé. “The town’s got better things to worry about that the two of us making out on a rooftop.”

“True,” he concedes, but he can’t shake his 1940s sensibilities completely. Darcy must catch some of his reservations on his face, because she sighs and presses her forehead against his. In the heat of the day, their skin is covered by a thin layer of sweat.

“I like you a lot, Bucky,” she says lowly. Bucky swallows thickly, but he smiles at her all the same.

“An idiot could work out I’m sweet on you too.”

She laughs, and their noses brush against each other when she kisses him again, soft and sweet. “You’re cute.”

He wiggles his brows at her suggestively. “I’m more than cute, thank-you very much.”

Her gaze darkens for a moment, and her answering smile seems almost feral. “Careful,” she warns, “I might hold you to that statement.” She grinds against him briefly and Bucky bites back a groan, before she rolls off him and stands. He blinks up at her in surprise, the loss of her warmth like a punch in the gut, despite the hot day.

“Where’re you going?” he asks dumbly. Darcy smiles, and bends to pick up the hat from where she’d discarded it. His eyes follow the movement, watching her jeans ride up a little higher on her thighs.

“Inside,” she says, dusting imaginary specks of dust from the hat, “where there’s air-conditioning and food.”

As if on cue, he feels a pang of hunger in his gut and he grins. “Sounds like a good idea,” he says. She hums and her leg brushes against his shoulder when she goes.

He watches her leave, walking carefully across the rooftop before climbing down the ladder around the back of the building. She sends him a wide grin before she disappears of the edge and Bucky thinks he could be happy here. He wonders if Steve and the Howlies would begrudge him that much.

He hopes not, he thinks to himself, before heaving himself up to follow her.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy and Bucky go to New York post the Incident.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This could be pre-Wintershieldshock if you squint your eyes and tilt your head a bit.

Bucky can’t stop his pacing. There is a hopeless, restless energy that seems to bubble beneath his skin. He’s nervous, and worried, and maybe even a little bit scared, though he’ll never admit it (not even to Darcy).

“Would you quit it?” Darcy says suddenly, and Bucky starts, glancing over at her guiltily. “Jesus Bucky, you’re giving _me_ the jitters.”

He shrugs helplessly at her. “Sorry.” Darcy rolls her eyes, knowing he doesn’t really mean it. “I can’t help it.”

She pats the seat beside her pointedly, eyebrows raised. They’re waiting for a man who may or may not be called ‘Happy’ to come and fetch them, but he’s taking his sweet time, as far as Bucky is concerned. He sits down beside her reluctantly, and without even thinking about it his leg starts up, bouncing up and down nervously. Darcy sighs heavily and places a proprietary hand down just above his knee, squeezing his thigh tightly. His leg stills.

“Buck,” she murmurs softly, “it’s gonna be fine.”

“What if he doesn’t remember me?” he blurts out. “What if it’s not really him? What if-”

“And what if he _does_ know it’s you?” she asks, her voice pitched low and soothing. She squeezes his thigh again. “You won’t know for sure unless you make an effort, sweetheart.”

He hums and Darcy sighs heavily, and leans back into the hard-backed seat. Like most of the foyer in Stark Tower, it’s sleek and modern and uncomfortable. The foyer itself doesn’t look much worse for wear, considering everything that went down in Manhattan **two weeks ago** **.** It had been a miracle they’d even managed to get into the city; most areas are still closed off, without working water or power, roads blocked off with rubble and the rotting, fetid carcasses of their would-be invaders. The subways however were mysteriously working, and they’d managed to catch one under the guise of volunteering for clean-up. He still can’t help but feel guilty about it.

His other leg starts tapping.

“ _Bucky._ ”

“But what if he doesn’t want to see me? What if he’s angry that I didn’t help out in the battle? I could have helped- should have come here-”

“And what if he’s just happy to have you here?” she says, exasperation lacing her voice. Her grip on his thigh loosens and she flips her hand over- he laces his fingers through hers on instinct and her thumb runs comfortingly over the back of his hand. “I bet he’s feeling really lonely and sad right now. According to the papers he’d only been out of the ice for a couple of weeks. He probably misses you terribly,” she says lowly. Bucky bites the inside of his cheek. His chest aches. “Don’t you think Steve would just be happy to have you back?”

He bows his head and breathes out slowly. Darcy is a comforting warmth beside him. He knows exactly how Steve is likely to feel right now- it’s scarcely been a year, and the grief of his arrival is still fresh in his mind. Captain America’s apparent resurrection has reopened barely-healed wounds.

He wants to go home. He wants to run away. He wants to hide from anything resembling his old life and curl around Darcy for a week. He wants to march up to the top of the Tower and sock Steve in the jaw.

A man exits a concealed elevator before he can do any of those things, and Darcy makes a satisfied sound, standing up. Hand still clasped in his, she drags him up with her.

“Happy!” she exclaims. Bucky raises a brow; the man doesn’t look very happy at all. In fact, he looks tired and harried, much like the rest of the people in New York these days. His face brightens at the sight of Darcy, but his answering grin doesn’t erase the bags beneath his eyes.

“Kid!” he answers, and Darcy lets go of Bucky’s hand to run and embrace him. He laughs and swings her around like a child. Darcy giggles at the treatment. The young woman at the reception desk eyes them with unmasked disapproval, but is ignored as Happy sets Darcy down, holding her out at arm’s length.

“Look at you!” he says, looking over her proudly. “All grown up!”

Darcy snorts and rolls her eyes. “Happy, you saw me two years ago; I’m twenty-five!”

He grimaces. “Don’t remind me.” Happy’s gaze falls on Bucky and he raises a brow. “And who’s this?”

Bucky straightens and holds out his hand. “James Bennet,” he says smoothly, well used to the lie these days. “Nice to meet you.”

Happy takes his hand with something very close to reluctance, glancing between Darcy and him with thinly-veiled suspicion. Bucky smiles back at him blandly as his fingers are enthusiastically crushed in the larger man’s grip. He’s not unused to the treatment; Rhodey had been exactly the same. Happy looks put out when he takes his hand away.

“Do I know you?” he asks, studying Bucky’s face carefully. “You seem familiar.”

He shrugs. “I’ve done some modelling in the past,” he lies. Satisfaction flashes across Happy’s face.

“That sounds… interesting,” he says slowly, his tone implying that he thinks the opposite, and Darcy elbows Bucky in the side before he can say something smart back.

She huffs, clutching at Bucky’s arm suggestively. “James is my _partner_ , Happy,” she says sternly, “and he’s a very good boy. Aren’t you James?”

“I’m a very good boy,” Bucky deadpans, and Darcy coos and pats his shoulder encouragingly.

“See? _And_ he’s dad-approved, so you _don’t_ need to go vetting him, you hear me?” Darcy points at Happy accusingly, and the man has the decency to look embarrassed.

“I gotcha kiddo,” he grumbles, and Bucky bites his lip at the put-out expression on his face. “You here to see Tony?”

Darcy nods enthusiastically, fingers digging into the meat of Bucky’s arm, as though sensing his sudden return of nerves. “We are. Thought I should tote around the new beau, you know?”

“Right,” Happy says, nodding like he _does_ know, but doesn’t want to. “Sure. And the fact that it’s barely been **two weeks** since the Incident and Tony’s… friends are still hanging around has nothing to do with it.”

“Of course not,” Darcy says innocently. Happy looks unconvinced.

He leads them to the elevator he’d just come out of and the door slides open silently. Darcy walks inside like she owns the place, despite the way her scuffed sneakers and ratty jumper scream that she is anything but. Bucky feels like an imposter beside her, nervy and unsure, dread gathering in his gut. His fingers start tapping on his thigh as Happy jabs the floor into the elevator’s display, and Darcy’s hand creeps over to cover his, fingers twining loosely between his own. She sends him a slight smile and Bucky is forced to look away.

“So how have things been?” Darcy asks, and Happy sighs heavily, rubbing at his face tiredly.

“Not great. The Tower is still a mess; we’ve got contractors working on fixing up the levels trashed by Loki, but with half the streets still in lockdown, it’s been tough getting them in. And then there’s Tony and his-” he breaks off, gaze falling on Bucky. “Well, Tony’s been preoccupied.”

“I can imagine,” Darcy hums. Bucky concentrates on the strange feeling of the elevator; motionless, but impossibly fast all at once, if the floors speeding past on the display are any indication. In no time at all the numbers reach the eighties, and he feels it begin to decelerate. The doors open with a cheery _ding_.

Happy motions for them to leave, but he stays in the elevator. Darcy glances at him in surprise. “Aren’t you coming too?” she asks. He shakes his head.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” he says, grimacing. Something _pings_ softly on his wrist and he huffs in exasperation, glancing down at it. “I’ve got to go; it’s good to see you Darcy. Bennet.”

Bucky nods at the older man and lets Darcy drag him out of the elevator. “Nice to meet you,” he says as the doors close behind them and Happy nods distractedly. The doors close between them, unnervingly silent.

Bucky breathes out slowly, taking a moment to take in the floor. It must have once been quite a nice living room- open plan, like most places in this century seem to prefer- but has obviously copped a fair amount of damage from the battle. It looks like a demolition crew has been through, promptly followed by an army of cleaners; the counters are cracked and there are scorch marks on one wall, but whatever broken glasses and furniture may have been here are gone, and the place seems strangely sanitary. Even the inexplicable crater in the middle of the floor is clean, broken floor tiles and dust long since removed.

“Love the décor,” he drawls, unable to help himself. Darcy snorts and elbows him in the side. “Very Stark.”

“Behave,” she murmurs, but her eyes are laughing, and Bucky doesn’t feel particularly chastised. He grins at her and she huffs and rolls her eyes, before glancing up at the ceiling. She opens her mouth to speak, but both hear the tell-tale sound of an argument before she has a chance to. He raises a brow at the agitated voices, and his gaze follows the sound to the balcony, where Stark is gesticulating almost violently at a tall, blonde-haired man. For a time, Bucky can almost convince himself that it’s Thor, but the hair is wrong, and his build is slimmer.

“Is that-” he starts, before breaking off, licking at his dry lips. Darcy squeezes at his hand, fingers still intertwined before letting go.

“I think it is,” she says, and she nudges at him with her shoulder.

Bucky starts forwards- one, two, three steps, before he stops again, the strange feeling of dread in his stomach growing even more pronounced. “I don’t-” he swallows, and his hand worries at the hem of his t-shirt. “But what if he’s not _my_ Steve?”

Darcy- beautiful, wonderful Darcy- just hugs him from the side, her arms wrapping around his waist comfortingly. “It’ll be fine,” she promises. She leans up and presses a soft, sweet kiss to the corner of his mouth and Bucky’s chest tightens at the gesture. Fuck he loves this woman.

He tells her as much, the words soft and fond. Darcy smiles softly and kisses him again. “I know,” she breathes against his lips. “I love you too.”

She pulls away, and this time when she smiles, it’s cheeky, the soft moment between them gone. Darcy slaps his ass, and Bucky jumps. “Now go out there and say hello,” she orders. Bucky complies, but not because she’s telling him to do it.

(Honest.)

He walks quickly across the large room, skirting around the crater in the floor, and the doors open automatically for him as he approaches. The sounds of Stark and Steve arguing become clear, but they break off at his entry.

Stark’s eyes widen at the sight of them and his mouth falls open. “Damn,” he breathes. “I knew I was forgetting something.”

“Stark,” Steve says warningly, his back to the door and Bucky. “What are you-” he turns, following Stark’s line of sight and trails off, eyes widening in shock.

The balcony is silent for what feels like an age, and Bucky takes the opportunity to drink in the sight of his friend. Steve- it’s _Steve_. Big and strong just like Erskine made him, and his hair is too long and his clothes are too modern (and _tight,_ goddamn) but it’s still Steve. Still the best friend he’d thought dead for the better part of a year, the ache of it still as devastating as the day he arrived here.

He swallows as the silence grows more pronounced. The expression on Steve’s face is stark; face pale, eyes wide, he looks like he’s been punched in the gut.

“Hey Stevie,” Bucky says, when the quiet between them becomes too profound.

“ _Bucky?_ ”

He smiles ruefully, and shrugs. “In the flesh.”

Steve makes an abortive attempt to reach out before stopping short. He hasn’t blinked yet. “I don’t understand.”

Behind him, Stark takes a step backwards.

“It’s a long story.”

Steve makes a soft, wounded sound. “But Buck,” he says, voice soft, “you _died_. I watched you fall- _you died!_ ”

Bucky winces. “Well-” he starts, but Steve is shaking his head now; he looks close to crying.

“No,” he says firmly, and something in Bucky’s chest breaks at the sound. “ _No_ \- you can’t be him. Bucky _died. He’s dead_ , I watched him fall! There was nothing I could do!”

Bucky takes a tentative step towards his friend. “What, you think you’re the only one who can come back from the dead, you damn punk?”

Steve stares at him, the look in his eyes wild. He bites his lip. “It’s- Bucky?”

He smiles, and hopes he doesn’t show Steve how brittle he feels inside. “Yeah pal, it’s me.”

Steve covers his mouth with one of his huge hands, eyes abnormally bright. “Oh God- _Bucky_ ,” he breathes, and then he’s striding towards Bucky, arms wrapping around him so tight Bucky would be half afraid he might snap in half were it not for Zola. “ _Bucky_ ,” Steve gasps, his voice wet, and Bucky hugs him back tightly. His eyes burn with the threat of tears, and his chest feels tight from more than just Steve’s hug.

God, but he feels like he’s finally found _home_.

“Steve,” he says, and Steve shudders in his hold, face burying into the crook of his neck.

“I thought- thought you were dead,” he gasps, voice breaking. Bucky swallows thickly, clutching at Steve a little tighter.

“Not dead,” he says tightly, and Steve chokes back a sob. He smells like soap and freshly laundered clothes; clean. “‘M sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”

“Bucky, I’m so sorry- I tried to catch you but-”

“Steve,” Bucky growls, and he clutches at the back of Steve’s shirt firmly. “Don’t apologise for that; it ain’t your fault. Was never your fault.”

“I shoulda grabbed you. Shouldn’t’ve let you fall,” Steve babbles and Bucky pulls back, gripping his shoulders and shaking the man to grab his attention. His face is red; he looks distraught.

“ _Steve_. I will _never_ blame you for that train. Steve, _listen to me_ \- it wasn’t your fault that I fell. You gotta know that.”

Steve draws away and rubs at his eyes, reddened by the tears that stream down his face. He sniffles and laughs, a sad sound that Bucky vividly remembers hearing far too much just after Steve’s ma died. He hates it. “I thought I was the only one,” Steve confesses. “How did they find you?” He tilts his head, confusion and something terribly close to suspicion in his gaze. “How _did_ you survive the freeze, Buck?”

“Uh- I didn’t?” Bucky scratches the back of his head sheepishly. “I kind of… fell through time and space instead? And- uh- Shield didn’t find me... Actually, Shield doesn’t even know I’m still alive, so if you could keep it that way, I’d appreciate it, pal.”

“You fell through time and space,” Steve says flatly. Bucky cringes.

“Well when you say it, it sounds crazy.”

Steve scrubs at his face again. The look of devastation has been replaced with exasperation. “What you’re telling me, Buck, is that instead of falling to your death in the Alps, you ended up here? In- what- 2011?”

“2010, actually,” Bucky corrects him. He frowns. “It’s almost been a year, actually. Wow.”

Steve is quiet for a long moment, his sharp gaze studying Bucky carefully. He fights the urge to shuffle his feet under the stare, feeling uncomfortable, but he takes the opportunity to take in his friend. Steve seems… not older- he can’t be, not with how little time has really passed for him- but… more careworn. There’s a hardness to his gaze that Bucky is unfamiliar with, and the set of his shoulders is straight; almost _too_ straight, like he’s trying to hide just how tired he really is.

Eventually, his shoulders slump and he sighs heavily. “Okay,” he says. Bucky raises his eyebrows.

“Okay?”

“Okay, I believe you,” he clarifies. Bucky sucks in a sharp breath.

“I- you do?”

“Yes,” Steve says, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “I mean come on- it’s not like it’s the weirdest thing to happen to us; I just fought an army of aliens ten days after being defrosted.”

Against his better judgement, Bucky laughs. And keeps laughing, big, hysterical whoops that almost have him doubling over. Steve takes a half-step towards him in concern, but Bucky just waves him away. When he finally gets himself back under control, he straightens, wiping at the corners of his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, still snickering slightly. This should really not be that funny. “It’s just; Jane said the same thing, when I turned up.”

“Jane?” Steve asks, confused.

Bucky bites his lip. “She’s an astrophysicist- Thor’s girl. She and her assistant found me on the side of the road when I turned up here.” He smiles ruefully. “They thought I was drunk at first.”

“Thor’s girl?” Steve frown thoughtfully. “Doctor Foster, right? Didn’t Shield send her to Oslo?”

“Tromsø,” Bucky corrects him. Jane’s sudden and inexplicable job offer had been suspicious from the start, and the offer had only been for her and Darcy- not a surprise, considering Bucky was for all intents and purposes, an illegal alien (only, from a different time, rather than place). Unwilling to clue Shield into his survival, Bucky had been forced to remain behind in Puente Antiguo whilst Darcy and Jane did as they were told. The whole thing had stunk and Bucky had been moments away from saying ‘fuck it’ and booking a ticket to Norway himself when all hell had broken loose in Stuttgart. Things had only gone downhill from there. By the time Darcy and Jane had finally come back, Bucky had been a nervous wreck. “They only got back a coupl’a days ago. It was Darcy that convinced me to come and see you.”

Steve raises a brow. “You weren’t coming to see me?”

He shrugs, staring out at the Manhattan skyline mulishly. The city looks worse for wear, but it still glitters prettily in the midday sun. “I dunno,” he huffs. “I would have turned up eventually, but I- I…”

“Didn’t know if it was really me?” Steve offers gently. Bucky sighs heavily, shoulders slumping.

“Yeah.” He looks away, hands in his pockets like a sulking child. “I guess I didn’t want to find out I was truly on my own here, cause- uh- apparently my being here might not be as simple as just time travel- Stark said it could be that I’m not even from this universe.”

“Wait-” Steve says, and Bucky glances back up at him at the affronted tone of his voice, “ _Stark_ told you?” His eyes widen with outrage. “Did Stark _know you were here?_ ”

“Um- yes?”

“And he didn’t _tell me?_ ”

Bucky grimaces, but Steve is already marching past him, back through the cracked glass doors into the living room, where Stark and Darcy are conferring quietly. “Steve!” Bucky tries, but Steve ignores him.

“Stark!” he barks. Bucky jogs after him as Stark glances back at them like a startled cat.

“Captain?” he says, somehow managing to sound derisive despite the two-hundred and twenty pounds of supersoldier stalking towards him. “To what do I ow your displeasure this time?”

Beside him, Darcy just rolls her eyes and Bucky is tempted to do the same. Steve however is unamused.

“You knew?’ he demands, standing uncomfortably close to the older man. Stark cringes away from him, but Bucky suspects it’s moreso because Steve is in his personal space rather than any fear of the man. “You _knew_ , and not once- _not- once-_ did it occur to you to tell me?”

“To be fair,” Stark says, taking a step away from Steve, “we were kind of in the middle of something at the time.”

“At any point, you could have said he was alive. _Any point!_ ” Steve snarls, and Bucky is struck by the realisation that he’d long since thought he’d never see Steve so angry again. He’s almost forgotten how animated he gets, eyes sparking dangerously, face turned pale in his fury. When he was small, he was a sight to behold, but it was only after Erskine that he became truly intimidating. Stark however, seems oddly immune to it.

“Would you believe me if I said I genuinely forgot?”

“NO! How could you have _possibly_ forgotten? You said it yourself Stark- you’re a fucking genius!”

Stark’s eyes widen at the expletive. “Wow Cap- that’s quite a mouth you’ve got on you-”

“Fuck you Stark, this is serious!”

Stark pulls a face. “What’s the big deal? He’s here now, isn’t he?”

“What’s the big deal?” Steve parrots incredulously. “He’s my best friend! And I thought-” he breaks off, voice unsteady. He swallows visibly and squares his shoulders in defiance, but the fury of moments ago has simmered into something raw and _hurt_. Bucky’s chest aches. “I thought I was the only one left.”

Stark sighs heavily, looking away, and Darcy, lower lip trapped between her teeth, edges over to Bucky carefully, ignored by the other two. Her hand tentatively brushes against his and Bucky weaves his fingers between hers again, uncaring about their company.

“I’m sorry,” he says, placating. “But I seriously just forgot; there was so much going on, and I hadn’t seen him for almost a year. And what with the tower being finished and everything, I’d almost completely forgotten about him.”

Steve clenches his jaw, glaring at the inventor. “I just-” he stops, and glances over at Bucky. His gaze lingers on Bucky and Darcy’s joined hands with muted surprise, and deflates completely. He rubs at his face tiredly. “ _Fine_ ,” he says eventually, with only a touch of venom in his voice. “Just- don’t do it again, okay?” He smiles wryly, but the twist of his lips is wrong- too sad and bitter. “There any other long-lost friends I should know about?”

Stark shrugs. “If I knew, you’d be the first to know,” he promises. Steve huffs a humourless laugh.

“I’m sure,” he says dryly, and Bucky grins. All three of them are all too familiar with the flightiness of the Starks. Bucky wonders if Steve finds it comforting or irritating to know it seems to run in the family.

With their argument apparently over, Darcy finally steps forward, hand outstretched in her typical display of irreverence. “Hi!” she says brightly, and Steve blinks at her in surprise. “Darcy Lewis. Jane and I found Bucky.”

Steve takes her hand tentatively, like he’s afraid to break her, but Darcy just smiles as she shakes his hand vigorously. Something in his friend seems to relax, and Bucky bites back a grin. “It’s nice to meet you,” he tells her, and Bucky thinks he means it. “From what I understand, you and Dr Foster are responsible for taking care of this jerk’s sorry ass?”

Darcy cackles, and Bucky scowls at the pair of them. “Oh, I like him,” she says, turning back to wink at him. He grimaces.

“Don’t listen to word he says, doll,” he tells her seriously, staring pointedly at Steve as he speaks. Steve just grins at him, unrepentant, and Bucky can’t really find it in himself to grudge him for it. He’s too grateful to just have him back. “Rogers is a liar and a punk and shouldn’t be trusted.”

“Hm,” Darcy hums, and she elbows him in the side teasingly. “No wonder the two of you got along.”

Bucky gasps at her in mock outrage. “ _Excuse me_ , but I’ll have you know that I was the level-headed one of the two of us.”

“Oh really,” she snorts, unimpressed. “And that time at Izzy’s?”

He scowls again. “I maintain that guy fell over on his own.”

Steve snickers at the pair of them. “I’m sure that was the case,” he drawls. “A right stand-up citizen you are.” Bucky points a finger at him accusingly, though secretly, he’s pleased as punch. Falling back into the swing with Steve feels as easy as breathing.

“None of that,” he says sternly. “It was always your ass I was pullin’ outta trouble, and don’t you forget it.” He turns to Darcy, who is watching them with a bemused expression that matches Stark’s almost exactly. “Don’t you go listening to him, you hear me? Steve was always getting’ into all sorts of trouble. Punk woulda died at ten were it not for me.”

Darcy just laughs at him.

“Well,” Stark says, glancing between the three of them, bemused, “as enlightening as this is to learn about America’s favourite national treasure, I’ve got to run.”

Darcy pouts at the older man. “So soon, Uncle Tony?” she simpers, and Stark stares at her in mute horror. “But I was just about to ask for money!”

He snorts and shakes his head. “Darcy the day you ask me for money is the day I hand over the Ironman suit to Senator Stern. Or do I need to remind you of the Great College Debate?”

Darcy waves her hand dismissively. “I think we’re good. Go back to your wooing of Dr Banner.”

Tony’s eyes narrow. “You’ve been talking to Pepper, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says innocently. Stark glares at her.

“You’re not to scare him off,” he says warningly. “I am so close to convincing him. _So close_.”

Darcy snickers and rolls her eyes, and Bucky and Steve share a bemused look. “Don’t worry; I won’t ruin this science boy-band thing you’re trying to make.”

Tony pokes his tongue out at Darcy childishly. “Ah-huh. You be sure to let Foster know the offer to join in still stands.”

“Will do,” she says dryly, in a way that makes Bucky think she’ll do no such thing. He’s unsurprised.

Stark leaves, and the three of them watch him exit in silence. Steve huffs a sigh as soon as the elevator door closes behind him, and runs a hand through his hair. It’s a familiar gesture. “God,” he says simply. Darcy huffs a quiet laugh.

“He’s a bit much, isn’t he?” she asks, eyes glittering with poorly-disguised mirth. Steve sends her a long-suffering look.

“That’s one way of putting it,” he says. His expression softens, gaze regarding the elevator doors thoughtfully. “He comes good in a fight though…. More than I could have hoped.”

She nods sagely. Bucky decides not to voice his relief that the two of them seem to be getting along well. “In my experience, most of his bravado is a mask. When it matters, Tony’s a good man. Far more generous than people give him credit for.”

“Yeah,” Steve murmurs, that thoughtful look still in place. Bucky wonders what he’d been arguing with Stark about before they’d turned up. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that impression.”

Darcy laughs softly, and takes Bucky’s hand again. He squeezes her fingers lightly, and she sends him a soft, sweet smile that never fails to make his chest constrict. Sometimes he still can’t believe she lets him stick around.

When Bucky glances back up, Steve’s eyes are sad, and he looks away when Bucky catches him, looking almost guilty. Bucky clenches his jaw.

“So,” Darcy says, voice almost falsely bright, and both of them look up. “Lunch?”

Sad eyes or not, Steve’s answering smile is warm. “Yeah. Lunch sounds great.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank-you to everyone who said they enjoyed this fic, but this is as much as I plan to write for this universe, so please don't go demanding more. If anyone WOULD like to write in this verse, they're more than welcome to, but it's doubtful I will go delving into this storyline any time soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to come and chat with me on [tumblr](http://cinnaatheart.tumblr.com/) :D


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